More from the Author

Enrique Peña Nieto, the presidential candidate of the old Mexican ruling party elected in 2012, passed the most fundamental reforms in at least two decades. They included allowing private competition in the energy sector, including with the state-owned oil company, Pemex; strengthening competition in the telecoms industry; promoting private-bank and public development-bank lending. Also, political reforms allowed re-election (formerly prohibited) to all legislative posts, and gave key regulatory agencies independence from the executive. Would these reforms actually be implemented on the ground? Would they achieve good growth for more jobs and better income distribution? Would they finally make Mexican democracy work, or partly restore the hegemony of the old ruling party?

Why did America embrace consumer credit over the course of the twentieth century, when most other countries did not? How did American policy makers by the late twentieth century come to believe that more credit would make even poor families better off? This book traces the historical emergence of modern consumer lending in America and France. If Americans were profligate in their borrowing, the French were correspondingly frugal. Comparison of the two countries reveals that America's love affair with credit was not primarily the consequence of its culture of consumption, as many writers have observed, nor directly a consequence of its less generous welfare state. It emerged instead from evolving coalitions between fledgling consumer lenders seeking to make their business socially acceptable and a range of non-governmental groups working to promote public welfare, labor, and minority rights. In France, where a similar coalition did not emerge, consumer credit continued to be perceived as economically regressive and socially risky.

In 2010, the European Union faces the challenges of the global financial crisis. With 27 member states, each facing different challenges, can new EU institutions respond effectively? Will its new currency, the euro, survive?